by Angela Guess
Derrick Harris recently shared the story of how OMGPOP scaled to over 36 million users in just three weeks. Harris writes, “OMGPOP can thank the cloud for its acquisition by Zynga on Wednesday. The gaming startup, whose Draw Something iPhone app used cloud computing and a NoSQL database to scale from zero (relatively speaking) to more than 35 million downloads in three weeks and never miss a beat.”
In a call with Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold, Harris learned that, “(1) OMGPOP is hosted in the cloud, but ‘they’re not on Amazon.’ (2) Draw Something has been downloaded more than 35 million times. Players have created more than 1 billion pictures and are creating around 3,000 pictures per second. (3) To handle the incredible traffic spike, OMGPOP had to reconfigure its Couchbase cluster, scale it into the many tens of nodes, and many terabytes of data and increased throughout into the tens of thousands of operations per second. (4) Throughout all this, Draw Something didn’t experience any downtime.”
Harris adds, “This type of load really stresses a system, Wiederhold said, and if it wasn’t for its decision to use cloud computing and NoSQL technologies, ‘their game would have fallen over.’ EA recently removed its ‘The Simpsons: Tapped Out’ game from Apple’s App Store after server problems prevented users from being able to login. It’s not clear what, exactly, caused EA’s problem, but it speaks to the importance of having components that are able to scale as apps go viral.”
photo credit: OMGPOP
